The marketing and sales of consumer products are contemporarily highly competitive. In order to remain ahead in such competition, manufacturers and retailers invest enormously in researching around marketing and sales aspects of their consumer products. Typically, such research is an attempt to understand what influences a given customer's purchasing decision. For example, the research may include studying locations of products in a store, where they are displayed or advertised. Moreover, such research may include gathering information about a given customer's activities, like customer movement within the store, interest shown by the given customer in any particular product, amount of time spent viewing specific products, successful purchase of products and so forth.
However, such conventional marketing research encounters various difficulties. Firstly, such marketing research is performed manually, and therefore, such techniques may involve time-consuming processes. Generally, such techniques involve one or more persons (such as one or more store employees) to record the movements of customers within an environment (such as a mall, a departmental store and so forth). Furthermore, the one or more store employees may record the movements of customers within the facility on a paper sheet representing its layout. Thereafter, the accumulated data would be reviewed to determine the region of interest or products that the customer liked within the environment. Additionally, in this technique, an environment may have a finite number of employees for recording the customer movement. Therefore, the customer movements may be recorded only in specific locations. Moreover, the aforesaid technique is labor-intensive and is generally prone to inaccuracies. Furthermore, conventional market research employs surveys and shopping diaries that require customers to record manually their travel patterns, identifying the stores they visited and time spent by them within the stores. Thus, such techniques do not provide privacy for the customer and usually, interferes with the customer's experience within the environment. Therefore, it will be appreciated that such techniques are ineffective, are associated with inaccuracies and are not customer-friendly.
Therefore, in light of the foregoing discussion, there exists a need to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks associated with conventional market research techniques to determine customer interest.